DIY Cultures and the Global South

Abstract

As a core aspect of its mission, DIY, Alternative Cultures and Society is committed to featuring work from the growing community of scholars invested in studying DIY cultures in a global context. The concept of DIY, its history, and socio-political and cultural agendas are well documented in academic scholarship. The date, however, most of the work published on DIY cultural production and consumption has been written by Global North scholars and focuses in large part on Global North contexts and examples. Undoubtedly, the succession of radical movements that have arisen across the Global North during the 20th and early 21st centuries merit close scrutiny and analysis. Such movements, from Dadaism in the 1920s (Elgar and Grosenick, 2004) and situationism (1957 – 1972) (Wark, 2011) to the late 1960s counter-culture (Clecak, 1983) and (anarcho) punk (Cross, 2010; Hebdige, 1979) from the late 1970s onwards have each in their own ways forged counter-hegemonic narratives using such mediums as art, music fashion and literature. Alongside these spectacular examples of DIY cultural production and consumption, are more mundane yet equally pertinent examples including dumpster diving (Eikenberry and Smith, 2005) and craftivism (Greer, 2014), practices that have acquired increasing gravitas in a post-industrial era characterised by mounting austerity and precarity (Standing, 2011). And yet, while such work has done much to illustrate and illuminate the attempts of groups and individuals to engage with and counter harsh and worsening socio-economic and political conditions in the industrialised world, it tells us very little about the rest of the world; those countries that remain on the global periphery in regions that are collectively termed the Global South (Dargin, 2013). Neither the Global North nor the Global South are exclusively geographic terms, as illustrated in the case of Australia and New Zealand, countries that are geographically situated in the southern hemisphere, and within the primarily Global South continent of Oceania, but are industrially advanced nations. By